Abstract
Middle voice verbs contrast with transitive active verbs in showing detransitivization. However, they also constitute a heterogeneous set syntactically and semantically, including anticausative, dispositional, inherent reflexive, and passive readings, with a syntax that seems more unergative or unaccusative depending on the reading and the language. Thus the category has defied attempts at a unified formal definition, leading some to suggest it is a family of constructions or a notional category. We present data on ber- middles in Indonesian and their allomorphs, which show all of the canonical types of middle voice readings but also several additional types not attested in other languages. These include some in which both of the corresponding active forms’ arguments are expressed as direct arguments, where the subject of the active corresponds to the subject of the middle and the object is incorporated. Although this may seem to add additional reason to support a family of constructions analysis, we show that a single unified definition is possible. We propose that ber- suppresses one argument of the verb, but it is unspecified as to which is suppressed. Different independent argument realization possibilities of Indonesian conspire to sometimes suppress the subject and sometimes the object. Coupled with principles of implicit argument interpretation and lexical semantic and pragmatic factors, all of the middle readings of Indonesian arise from this one operation. Middles in other languages may in turn follow from the same analysis, but some of the available options may not arise owing to typological aspects of those languages, and a family of constructions analysis may even be necessary in those cases. Thus a syntactically and semantically unified analysis of middles is possible, albeit manifesting in different ways in different languages.
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Notes
The glosses below follow the Leipzig Glossing Conventions, plus the following abbreviations: av = agent (active) voice, emph = emphatic, inv = involitive mood, mv = middle voice, npst = non-past tense, ov = object (active) voice, post = postpositional case, prt = participle, vol = volitive mood.
We employ the terms “unaccusative” and “unergative” here in a descriptive way for verbs taking a subject DP that is either the root’s underlying object (“unaccusative”) or its underlying subject (“unergative”). We remain neutral as to how to define those grammatical functions and how object-to-subject promotion is implemented, though for purposes of outlining a concrete formal analysis we adopt a raising analysis.
Alternatively, middles formed with pronominals/clitics as in (1) might be transitive, with the pronominal/clitic se filling an argument position as per Schäfer (2017) on Romance (see also Doron and Rappaport Hovav 2009; Sportiche 2014; Alexiadou et al. 2015: 110–114; inter alia). This is contra treating se as a verbal head/modifier à la Labelle (2008) or Koontz-Garboden (2009), inter alia (see also Alexiadou and Schäfer 2014 and Alexiadou et al. 2015: 103–107 on German reflexives, and Beavers and Zubair 2016: 98–103 on Sinhala dispositional/reflexive middles). Even here though it is non-obvious whether the surface DP is the base subject or object; Schäfer suggests it can be both. Our study focuses on middles formed via head-marking without pronominals, but we return to transitive analyses in Sect. 2.5 and Sect. 7.1.
The N in meN- represents a final nasal consonant that shows place assimilation with the first segment of the verbal root it attaches to; see Sneddon (1996: 9). Indonesian generally does not indicate tense; the tenses in the translations here and below are what are deemed the most natural interpretations in English.
These are more common in Malay than Indonesian and speakers vary on their acceptability, though some Indonesian speakers we have consulted do accept them, and naturally attested examples can be found:
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Again, our goal is to explain their properties when they do arise for a speaker rather than when they will arise.
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Example (10c) might be acceptable on reading where only the car had properties allowing the causer to sell it (following on the responsibility meaning mentioned above). However, this is not the intended reading.
To illustrate the range of (im)possible control relations between surface DPs and PRO, and to ensure inanimacy is not responsible for the inability of a DP to control PRO, we use human subject and object DPs since these can in principle readily be agents, though this requires somewhat unusual examples.
The unacceptability of rationale clauses here holds regardless of whether the reading is more like a dispositional or a passive, modulo the caveat about pragmatic controllers.
As noted in Sect. 1, middles can have reciprocal readings, true also in Indonesian (e.g. ber-tengkar mv-fight, ‘fight with each other’) (Sneddon 1996: 109–110; Ogloblin and Nedjalkov 2007; Udayana 2017). Circumfix ber- -an forms reciprocals productively, though our focus is on simple ber- forms (which Ogloblin and Nedjalkov 2007: 1455 suggest are lexicalized). For now we assume reciprocals can be assimilated to reflexives as a special type for plural subjects (see e.g. Haug and Dalrymple 2019: 9), and do not address them distinctly.
As a reviewer notes, ber-dandan also has a conventional usage meaning ‘be adorned (with clothes, jewelry, etc.)’ Of course, an event of the sort described by reflexive or passive ber-dandan must have occurred to become so adorned. So it is not clear this is a separate usage. But if so, it is not unexpected that it could arise since it would be a natural pathway of lexical drift through for a term to develop a stative sense reflecting the target state of the event in the sense of Kratzer (2000: 386). See Beavers and Koontz-Garboden (2020: 72–73) for discussion of lexical drift resulting in loss of eventive entailments for English closed and broken.
There is another reflexive middle that has a seemingly adjectival base, including those that describe emotional states such as ber-sedih, mv-sad ‘sadden oneself’ from sedih ‘sad.’ It is mysterious if these are derived from intransitive adjectives rather than transitive verbs. However, for some speakers these ber- forms have the same meaning as the corresponding meN- -kan when such forms occur with a reflexive object:
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That the meaning of the ber- form is causative suggests it is derived from the meN- -kan verb and not the adjective (and is interpreted as reflexive for whatever reason), thus assimilatable with natural reflexives. That said, for some speakers ber-sedih can have a purely stative reading. However, as a reviewer notes these could reflect a ber- form with a non-verbal base deriving a possessional ‘have sadness’ stative reading as in Sect. 4 (see e.g. Francez and Koontz-Garboden 2017), or it could arise through lexical drift as per fn. 10. Finally, there are a few ber- forms with reduplicated adjective bases that lack meN- variants, including bersenang∼senang ‘enjoy oneself’ (from senang ‘happy’), and bermalas∼malas ‘loaf oneself around’ (from malas ‘lazy’), suggesting these may be deponents (see Sect. 6). We leave these for future research.
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There is another ber- middle whose subject is the underlying subject, namely cognition middles as with verbs like mem-(p)ikir-kan/ber-pikir, av-think-cuas/mv-think ‘think,’ where the complement is a clause rather than an NP (see e.g. Jeoung 2018: 62–63):
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Our focus is on verbs with noun phrase complements, but as we note in fn. 24 an extension of our analysis of incorporated object middles can extend to these.
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A reviewer notes that some antipassives show incorporation, as shown by Baker (1988: 130–146) and discussed more recently by Polinsky (2017: 312–314), who also notes that antipassive morphemes can sometimes be syncretic with middle, reflexive, and passive marking. Indonesian has no regular antipassive (Aldridge 2011: 343), though the correlation between incorporation middles and antipassives more broadly is an interesting one. However, it would take us too far afield and thus we leave it for further research.
Diri is homophonous with (and historically derived from) the noun diri ‘body.’ Short diri reflexives are also semantically distinguished from long reflexives in being restricted to only refer to patients (see Udayana 1994). As noted above, simple reflexive diri is possible with the meN- form, though it is again non-separable:
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As far as we are aware, meN- forms do not allow lexical NP incorporation; we thus treat this non-separable use of diri with meN- forms as a separate operation that we do not discuss further here.
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A syntactic analysis of incorporation and voice is not necessary. A lexical sharing analysis of incorporation à la Wescoat (2002) or Ball (2005)—wherein V and N are compounded in the lexicon and the resulting category has properties of both—is possible. This could be coupled with a treatment of voice as lexical inflection sensitive to compounding that constrains a separate verbal argument structure (as in Pollard and Sag 1994, Ginzburg and Sag 2000). Our claims do not hinge on the formal implementation so much as the idea that ber- shows variable detransitivization properties that interact with incorporation.
Alternatively, in the spirit of Jaeggli (1986: 590–599) we could say di- somehow syntactically represents the argument by bearing the relevant index and ϕ-features, assuming there is no null subject. The details of the analysis of passives ultimately do not matter here (see also Sect. 7.1). See Alexiadou et al. (2015: 123–143) for an excellent summary of the debate about implicit syntactic arguments in passives.
As Alexiadou et al. (2015: 141–142) note, the assumption of a syntactic weak implicit argument might derive the disjoint reference effect depending on its properties (see also Landau 2010: 376–377); we do not decide the issue, but instead assume both the weak implicit argument and an explicit disjoint reference effect.
Anticausatives also differ from causatives in being realized in involitive mood rather than the volitive. The interaction of anticausativization with (in)volitive mood plays a significant role in the argumentation of Beavers and Zubair (2013), but the details are irrelevant here and thus we ignore it. See also Beavers and Zubair (2016) for an extension of this analysis to other middles in Sinhala, briefly discussed in Sect. 7.
While Causer Suppression is a pre-syntactic operation over verbal roots, we analyze ber- as a v head over VPs. A lexicalist variant of our analysis of ber- as per fn. 15 would simply saturate the V’s second argument.
The role of lexical information constraining interpretation by default may in turn just be an outgrowth of the pragmatic Principle of Interpretive Economy of Kennedy (2007: 36, (66)) (“Maximize the contribution of the conventional meanings of the elements of a sentence to the computation of its truth conditions”), which Kennedy uses to explain how the lexical semantics and conventional usages of scalar adjectives figure into how they are interpreted in terms of scalar comparisons (see also Kennedy and Levin 2008).
We apply this only to dispositional/passive ber- middles since in a reflexive middle the open variable would already be conflated with the subject, and in a lexical NP incorporation middle the distinct XPs expressing the two arguments would preclude such a reading for pragmatic reasons. It is possible in context that the seller in (45) happens to be the same as the wanter in every case, though contingent coreference could also be true with an existential quantifier. It does not clearly reflect a separate reading intended to convey that.
Below we assume DPs may raise for syntactic reasons, and DP-traces represent open variables later λ-abstracted over prior to saturation by their antecedents (building on Heim and Kratzer 1998: 89–98). We ignore the semantics of T (which is irrelevant here) but assume it existentially binds off the event variable e we assume all verbs introduce (Higginbotham 1985: 560–561); nothing hinges on this. Finally, we assume head-movement has no semantic effect, and treat it as reconstructed, effectively ignoring it.
We are not claiming the NP is itself a classifier in the linguistic sense. Indonesian does have some classifiers, e.g. biji ‘thing/round object’ has this function, but does not in fact incorporate (cp. *Dia ber-kirim biji ‘3sg mv-send thing’, “(S)he sent something”). We leave an analysis of such classifiers aside here.
As noted in fn. 12, with cognition middles the surface subject is also the underlying subject, and the clausal complement is preserved. The analysis of incorporation middles here in principle should generate these as well, provided the analysis of both ber- in (43) and incorporation in (49) were generalized to allow for complements beyond those of type e, including whatever semantics the semantic type of a clausal complement is (e.g. a truth value, predicates over world, etc.). At that point the analysis would be otherwise identical, though since CPs presumably do not need to check Case, syntactic incorporation would not strictly speaking be necessary. However, we leave a detailed analysis of clausal complements for future work.
As a reviewer notes, Indonesian independently has nominal predicates, so it is not entirely clear that an incorporation analysis is necessary, though the voice marking suggests the predicate here is verbal and not nominal. Since these data otherwise exhibit the properties of incorporation we maintain this analysis.
There are also reciprocal kin terms like ber-teman ‘be friends.’ We believe the analysis we outline here plus a reciprocal semantics as per fn. 9 can account for those, though we leave the details for separate work.
These forms contrast with another apparently denominal ber- form seemingly formed from sortal nouns and which are inherently reflexive, including ber-kaca ‘mv-mirror’ “look at oneself in a mirror”. Here the reading is always causative and reflexive, paraphrasable by a corresponding meN- -kan form with a reflexive object. However, that the ber-kaca is paraphrasable by a meN- -kan form suggests is derived from that form rather than the noun, similar to the putative deadjectival ber- forms in fn. 11 (though kaca also has a separate clothing meaning of ‘glasses’ and ber-kaca can mean ‘wear glasses’). This is further supported by the fact that diri incorporation is possible (ber-kaca=diri has the same meaning), and stranded modifiers are ruled out, e.g. *ber-kaca baik ‘mv-mirror good’ “look at oneself in a good mirror”. Taken together, ber-kaca and ber-topi are thus not derived in the same way, with the latter but not the former formed from a noun base.
As a reviewer notes, these might be deponents; see Sect. 6. Sneddon (1996: 111–112) also gives denominal ber- -kan forms with specialized possessional readings, though we focus on simple ber-. Another reviewer notes that some institutional nouns form ber- middles, including ber-pendidikan ‘have education,’ ber-pengalaman ‘have experience,’ ber-agama ‘have religion,’ though the reviewer also notes that, as the glosses reflect, these are likely assimilatable to the same analysis as ber-topi. Relatedly, as in fn. 11, if adjectival roots like sedih ‘sad’ have taken on a possessional analysis (‘have sadness’; see Francez and Koontz-Garboden 2017) they could also be assimilated to ber- middles in this section, if X in (64a) can be an adjective.
A reviewer suggests that non-expression of an external argument yields a stronger effect that there is not a corresponding effector in the causing event. This would be surprising given that anticausatives are possible in contexts in which there is clearly an effector (e.g. The window broke—John hit it really hard with a hammer!; see Rappaport Hovav 2014: 25–26). Furthermore, in general verbs can entail unexpressed participants in cases where it is not clear we would want to posit null syntactic representation, as with instruments for verbs of cutting (see e.g. Koenig et al. 2008) and various types of paths, goals, and sources for verbs of motion (see e.g. Beavers 2012a). Thus we do not adopt this further assumption here.
For example, sama sekali/sedikitpun ‘at all/even a little’ are out in the following, unlike hanya ‘just’:
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Alternatively it could be that ‘by itself’ is anti-assistive as per Spathas et al. (2015: 1329–1337), introducing an actual entailment that the surface subject is the causer. However, it is debatable that this reading arises for all predicates. For example, contextually supported ‘by itself’ modifiers with statives like Gianni knew the answer by himself, in the context of whether someone fed Gianni the answer (see Alexiadou et al. 2015: 79, (35) for such an example in Italian), do not clearly license internal causation readings per se.
Schäfer and Vivanco (2016) suggest anticausatives are not causative at all but are purely inchoative (see also Rappaport Hovav 2014), though again a reflexive causative reading is possible in context. However, this does not rule out anticausative derivation: although Koontz-Garboden (2009: 123–125) argues that deleting meaning is non-compositional, Beavers (2012b) sketches a compositional “deletion” analysis in terms of constructing the meaning of the anticausative from the causative’s state-denoting lexical semantic constant, but not (necessarily) including causation in the event structure. This would provide a further semantic possibility for ber- that could alternatively characterize anticausatives, though for now we do not develop it further.
Ter- also marks involuntary passives, which like di- allow oleh ‘by’ PPs but not dengan sendiri=nya:
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This is distinct from anticausative formation, applying to more verb types, including activities, e.g. ter-belalai (mv-caress), ter-nyanyikan (mv-sing), which only have passive readings. Thus ter- may be a specialized allomorph of di- as well, or perhaps there is a way to unify them, though we leave a full analysis of ter- aside.
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Our comparison here is to comparable narrow descriptive classes such as naturally reflexive or dispositional expressions, etc. As a reviewer notes, a language may categorically lack any unified category of middle altogether. However, our goal is just to see what aspects of what we have proposed might apply across languages rather than to definitively answer what constructions are truly “middle” in some sense.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is a significantly revised and expanded version of Udayana (2011). We are indebted to three anonymous reviewers for their extensive feedback on earlier versions of this paper. We are also grateful to I Wayan Teguh and I Wayan Pastika for their expertise on Balinese and Indonesian and Jufrizal for his knowledge about the Minangkabaunese influence on Indonesian. We also thank David Basilico, Mar Bassa, Isabelle Bril, Gennaro Chierchia, Mary Dalrymple, Itamar Francez, Nissim Francez, Martin Haspelmath, Dag Haug, Hans Kamp, Andrew Koontz-Garboden, Isabel Oltra-Massuet, György Rákosi, Cilene Rodrigues, Steve Wechsler, Yoad Winter, Cala Zubair, Joost Zwarts, and audiences and participants at the 2013 Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, the Workshop on Formal Linguistics X, the ROLLING Institute on Argument Structure at Universitate Roveria i Virgili, the University of Texas syntax/semantics seminar, and the first author’s 2019 Word Meaning and Syntax seminar for their feedback. The order of authors is purely alphabetical. Both authors contributed equally to this paper.
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Beavers, J., Udayana, I.N. Middle voice as generalized argument suppression. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 41, 51–102 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-022-09542-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-022-09542-5